Schoolkid’s Instinctive Swim to Survive

Park Joon-hyuk, one of the high-school students who survived the capsized ferry, at the Korea University Medical Center in Ansan, near Seoul.

Eric Pfanner/The Wall Street Journal

ANSAN, South Korea — One wing of the Korea University Medical Center in this satellite city of Seoul houses dozens of survivors of this week’s Sewol ferry disaster.

Another wing hosts families of some of the dead, who have been coming to pay their respects at memorials set up at the hospital.

The juxtaposition of life and death in Ansan, where 325 of the 476 passengers on the ferry were students at a local high school, reflects tensions that are playing out in South Korean society in big and small ways after the tragedy.

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While families of the dead are mourning, and while relatives of the missing are furious with the authorities over what they call foot dragging in the rescue efforts, survivors and their families are struggling to come to grips with the burden that has been thrust upon them, too.

That includes Park Joon-hyuk, a 16-year-old member of the school’s badminton team, who barely escaped with his life on Wednesday after helping rescue other passengers.

When the boat began to list, Joon-hyuk was with about 10 other passengers in front of the ladies’ bathroom in a hallway on the third floor of the ferry. When the crew warned of danger, telling passengers not to move, the students sat down — and stayed there for about an hour.

“At first we didn’t think it was that serious,” Joon-hyuk said. But then the boat lurched further onto its side and the waters rose. “We heard the helicopters outside and told each other that the rescuers were coming.”

Joon-hyuk and his friends helped a young girl, not even 10 years old, don a lifejacket and hoisted her upward through a door, where rescuers were waiting. (Joon-hyuk believes she eventually made it back to shore.)

But Joon-hyuk and the other students were unable to reach the opening themselves, and began looking for another way out. The problem: by then, all other escape routes were blocked by water.

So Joon-hyuk and several other students took the plunge. In the murky water, there was no clear route to safety, so he felt his way around. Eventually he sensed an opening, swam through it and emerged into the open water. About 20 seconds after he surfaced, he was rescued.

“I wasn’t thinking about anything,” he said. “The only thing I was thinking about was coming back out of the water.”

When Joon-hyuk was rescued, he called his parents, telling them he was fine — and added that there was no need for them to travel to Jindo. He didn’t want his father, a construction worker, to take a day off.

“Joon-hyuk is the kind of boy who cares more about other people than himself,” his father, Park Jae-duck, said.

Joon-hyuk, who says he is thinking about becoming a history professor, suffered no serious injuries in the disaster, and he seems comfortable talking about it. But he also holds something back, and Mr. Park worries that beneath the stoic exterior, Joon-hyuk is suffering.